Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update available

During the excitement of the releases last week is that we also shipped a new version of Team Explorer Everywhere – our Eclipse and Cross-Platform client for Team Foundation Server. This is officially part of the TFS 2012 wave of products, meaning that it’s equivalent to Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update 3 though it’s also fully supported against TFS 2013 Preview, the hosted service and TFS 2010. We had a few important bug fixes and updates that we wanted to get into the “RTM” version of TEE rather than having them in a “Preview” labeled build which was the main motivation for making this an update to Version 11 rather than part of the VS 2013 Preview train. But rest assured that we’re still hard at work and will continue to release versions of Team Explorer Everywhere supporting each new version of TFS (and Eclipse) just as we’ve always done. We’re on track to ship another major version release of Team Explorer Everywhere with TFS 2013 when that is released.

The major updates we included in this update are:

Improved folder compare performance – The compare times when doing server to server paths went down from hours to seconds for certain queries but performance was improved in all scenarios including the most common local to server.

Execute bit fix – Fixed an issue that was meaning that the execute bit was not automatically set on download onto some Unix based systems when talking to a TFS 2012 Update 1 or Update 2 server.

Reliable uploads of large files – Added support for chunked uploads of files. When checking in really large files, the likelihood of an issue forcing the connection to get lost increases. On premises this is hardly ever an issue but when on the public internet this can be a big pain. Adding the support for chunked uploads means that the upload is much more reliable for large files.

Support for TFS 2013 Preview – this build has been tested against TFS 2013 Preview, the hosted service, TFS 2012 and TFS 2010. It should work back to all known public versions of TFS but those are the main versions that we test against during development.

Support for Eclipse Kepler (4.3) – this release of Team Explorer Everywhere is tested against the latest release of Eclipse and works all the way back to Eclipse 3.5

Support for FreeBSD – we’d got a number of users (both outside and inside the company) wanting support for FreeBSD in Team Explorer Everywhere (particularly the command line client to TFVC). We added the native code to support FreeBSD on 32 and 64-bit Intel architectures.

We will be releasing the next major version of Team Explorer Everywhere in the coming months. Expect to see some of the Team Explorer usability enhancements that we’ve been adding into the Visual Studio Team Explorer along with important features such as transparent symlink support on Unix file systems and better integration with eGit for projects that are hosted in TFS but with a Git rather than TFVC source control repository.